


heartless

by hieronyma



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers, Slavic Mythology & Folklore
Genre: Animal Death, Body Horror, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-14
Updated: 2015-06-14
Packaged: 2018-04-04 07:35:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4129846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hieronyma/pseuds/hieronyma
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A fairy tale about beginnings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	heartless

Once, for the very first time—when he was new, very new, before he even had a name—his chest opened up and his heart fell out into his small, frozen hands.

It was small and near-gray, and it didn’t belong where his hands could hold it. He tried to push it back into his chest, where that awful hollow feeling was, but it wouldn't go. It beat weakly in his cupped palms, the only point of warmth against his cold body.

He thought of leaving it, abandoning it. What could not stay inside him must not be worth much. But it was his heart; it belonged to him. It needed—protection. It needed care, and warmth. There was a hole in him now, a gaping one, and he had to find a way to fill it.

So he held it close, and walked.

The snow fell around him in gentle sheets, blurring the trees into a thicket of beckoning arms, calling him forward like a mother would her lost child. He went, not knowing where else to go.

He wandered for a long time. He couldn’t say how long, just that it never seemed to end. The trees would thin, and he’d pass through a clearing, and the sun or moon would shine whole and unsplit by the spindly hands of branches, but it would be gray and bleak and unwelcoming. Then he would enter the forest again and walk, flanked by tree trunks and snakelike roots half-buried in snow.

He felt tired, but he had never known a different feeling. Maybe he had been born tired.

 

* * *

 

The glinting eyes of hidden animals followed him. None tried to catch him. None but the house. 

He watched, frozen, as it walked toward him on spindly legs, right toward him, right for him—until suddenly it stopped, and its narrow wooden mouth swung open—but not to eat him.

An old woman came out. Her face looked like it was carved from old, lined wood; her nose was long and hooked and cruel, like an eagle’s beak. She was hunched, and her hair flew back from her forehead in long twisted wires, like old tree branches reaching up toward the winter sky. Deep-set eyes glittered from underneath heavy brows. They were as black as pools of oil.

“Fie!” she said, and her mouth flashed a smile full of stained teeth. They were pointed. “You! Is that whose blood I smell?”

The boy went down on his haunches and curled around his heart protectively, hiding his face. The old woman loomed above him, shuffling forward until her fur-covered feet entered his line of vision. One sharp finger prodded his shoulder and he flinched.

“No, boy,” she said. “Stand up!”

“I don’t want to,” he said, trembling.

“Fie!” she said again, and reached down to drag him up by the arms herself. Her grip was like iron. He struggled, but not much—he couldn’t risk dropping his heart. She held him by the shoulders and sniffed, one long drag; he flinched again, and shrunk away. Her eyes fell to the bundle he held.

“What’s this?” She peered at him, hawkish. He didn’t want to answer, but she already knew. “A heart, boy? Yours? Why do you carry your heart outside your body?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I tried to put it back.”

She assessed him for a moment longer, clucking.

“It is easier to hurt, when it is not inside,” she warned, after a lengthy pause. “But you will not feel the pain as much.”

He nodded. He knew. Once, hours ago—or days, he couldn’t tell, the passing of time was strange for him, hazy and vague against the blur of white—he had slipped and dropped it in the snow. He had not felt a thing inside his empty chest, except that it _was_ empty, but his hands had burned with melting ice when he had picked it back up, running in pink rivulets down the sharp bones of his wrist, and it beat so weakly for so long that he thought it might stop completely. After that, he had unwound his tattered scarf and wrapped it around his heart, trying to give it some protection against the biting wind. It wasn’t much, but it was all he had.

He clutched the little bundle to himself and felt it thump, unsteadily, in fear. “Who are you?”

She thought for a moment, then smiled a close-lipped smile. “Babulya will do.”

“Who am I?” He asked. “Do you know me?”

She considered him. “Yes. But you are new, so not well. I know your father, Voyevoda Zima. He is your son, also. You have many sons and daughters. But it is not for me to name you.”

“I have no father,” said the boy, knowing this to be true. "I have no family. I am too young for children. I was born alone."

"Zima would say he has no son," said Babulya. "But that does not mean anything to those like us. You have sisters, too. You did not come from a womb, but they are your family all the same."

“Can I meet them?”

“Soon.”

He looked down at his heart, and then back up at her. “Do you know how to put it back?”

The old woman laughed again. “Yes, I know a way. Come. I will help.”

She led him inside the chicken-legged house. It was dim inside, and smelled of soot and herbs and other smoky things, and a fire was going strong and bright in the hearth. A pot hung above it, steam curling lazily up the crooked chimney from its cast iron lip. The boy smelled a savoury odor that made his mouth go wet and numb; he undulated his tongue against the roof of his mouth and tried to swallow the smell. The sore feeling in his stomach cramped, and he understood with a sudden clarity that it meant he was hungry, even though he had never eaten before.

When he had been walking, he had seen small creatures ripped apart and consumed by bigger animals, leaving behind puddles of red that sank and spread into the snow. Perhaps the old woman, bigger and stronger than he, would put her teeth in him and swallow him whole.

Swallowing another pulse of fear, the boy asked, “Are you going to eat me, Babulya?”

“Ha!” The old woman threw back her head and cackled. “No, child. Not you.”

She hobbled over to an old oak chest, opening it with a groan of rusted hinges. Inside was a woven basket packed to the brim with several skeins of spun sheep’s wool and a drop spindle. She reached into the depths of the basket and withdrew something small and slender that glittered prettily in the firelight. Her fingers unfurled and then curled in one by one, beckoning him closer.

In her withered hand, she held a needle. She motioned again for to the boy to hold out his heart to her.

“No,” he said, clutching the organ to his breast. A thrill of fear lanced through him. She couldn’t steal it—she couldn’t. It wasn’t hers. “It’s mine.”

The old woman grunted. “I know what it is, boy. What use would I have for a weak little thing like that? I will not take it from you.”

After a moment, he held it out to her, but not to take. It beat weakly, as if in trepidation.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

“Watch,” said the old woman, leaning over him. She pierced his heart with the needle.

The boy opened his mouth to cry out, but he felt no pain. He thought he should have, watching the flesh give until the sharp point, but there was nothing. She let go once the tips of her finger and thumb touched the muscle, but the needle continued to sink in, and in, and then its point poked out the other side, clean of blood. She pulled it from the gray-pink flesh, pinching it carefully, and when it was out all the way, the boy could see a shining thread trailing from its eye that was not there before. It wasn’t a very long thread, but it was bright, and it looked strong.

The old woman wrapped the thread around the needle three times and tied it off with a small knot. Then the thread became one with the needle, and it glimmered silver in the light, thicker than it had been before.

“Come with me,” she said, and the boy did.

She led him to the stove, tiled and bricked and vast. Inside was a clutch of eggs. The old woman plucked one out, and, turning to him, held it aloft in front of his face; it was large and white and faintly dappled, as if it had come from a creature bigger than a bird. The boy remembered the house they were in, with its crooked legs, and door-mouth, and smoking womb. 

“Watch,” she said again, and slid the shining needle down into the egg. This time, it did not emerge from the other side; the egg had swallowed it up, holding it fast inside its fragile, unbroken shell, like a second yolk.

The old woman gave him the egg. The boy cradled it carefully. It did not beat like his heart did, but he felt it pulse with a similar warmth, pleasantly at home against his numb fingertips. “Do not drop it,” she warned him.

“I won’t,” the boy said, feeling it hum against his cool skin. He cupped it in his hands, a second fleshy shell of palms and fingers, shielding it from sight.

Hanging from a rack near her kitchen table was a row of animals, half of them birds, several plucked of their feathers. Babulya took an unplucked white mallard off the rack and held it up by its limp neck.

"This," she said, "to protect your pride. Now give me the egg."

The boy hesitated.

The old woman huffed. She motioned again. “Come, boy! I won’t hurt it.”

He swallowed his distrust. “Don’t drop it,” he said, anxiously, repeating what she had told him only minutes before.

She didn’t drop it. She pried open the duck’s bill and stuffed the egg down its throat.

Suddenly the duck came alive, squawking and flapping its wings helplessly against the old woman’s grip. She managed to pin its wings against its body and held it out, two-handed, to the boy, who struggled to balance both his heart and the squirming creature in his small arms. But when it was pressed to him, the duck calmed considerably, laying its small head against the boy’s bundled heart; it made no further sound and went gratefully limp like it had died a second time, but the boy could see it breathing in the calm rises and falls of its tiny chest.

The boy felt safer, somehow, but a little colder. He petted the duck’s smooth feathered neck in wonder.

“How do you make them come back?” he asked, as the old woman reached above him to unhook another animal from the rack.

“It is not _me_ who is keeping them alive,” she told him.

The old woman slit the hare down its belly with a paring knife. Blood seeped out over her gnarled hands, and its innards glistened wetly in the light of her fire. The boy felt his stomach clench. There was nothing inside it to crawl up his throat; still, it burned acidly, even if the sight was not too bad. He felt a trembling kinship with the poor, dead thing, with its fresh gaping wound—it, at least, still had all its organs.

"To house your cowardliness," said Babulya. "For it will run and run and never stop, so you do not have to. Give her to me.”

The old woman reached out for the duck with a red-smeared hand. The boy did.

Somehow, she fit the small duck inside the hare’s corpse, nestled tightly inside its ribcage like a second heart. The white feathers became stained as it struggled to escape its new prison. The boy swallowed down his unease. With one hand, she pressed the edges of the wound back together, encasing the duck in flaps of ripped flesh. Her hand procured a curved, crude needle—far uglier than the one in the boy’s egg, in the duck, in the hare—and sewed up the gash with wiry thread and swift strokes.

Like the duck, the hare came abruptly to life and tried to hop away, but the old woman held its legs fast. She handed it to the boy, who grasped it by the ruff as gently as he could. It calmed at his touch immediately and burrowed against the tattered fabric of his coat. Its fur was soft and warm against his hand, like the duck’s feathers had been; the boy petted it and looked into its big liquid eyes. It blinked lazily at him.

He treasured the feeling of holding a living thing in his hands, instead of the biting cold of wind and snow. He felt even safer now.

“Now,” said the old woman, “we go.”

 

* * *

 

The boy slept in front of the fire with the hare in his arms, lulled to sleep by the gentle rocking of the house as it walked. It walked for a long while. He lost count of the times he crossed over from dreams to wakefulness, floating as if submerged in warm water. He felt permanently drowsy, caught in time. His heart slowed but did not stop. The beats came so far apart that it was like the heart slept too, only rising from its slumber to pulse, and then falling once more into dreams.

He did not see the old woman. He smelled her, though. It was a comforting smell. He thought she might have sung to him with a voice like a raven's croak, about things that he somehow knew without knowing, but he could not remember anything clearly.

He came awake with her hand on his forehead. It pulled away when his eyes opened.

She gripped his upper arm like she had when they’d first met, only that seemed so long ago—but did not pull him up to his feet.

“Get up,” she told him. “We are almost finished.”

The chicken-legged house had stopped walking. When the old woman led him out, the boy did not recognize his surroundings. It was a warm, beautiful place. There was more color to the world than he had ever seen before. The trees bore brilliant green leaves, and their branches were not gnarled, but strong and heavy with thick, ripe fruit. The bark looked fresh and soft. Yellow flowers dotted the grass. The boy thought he could hear the distant cry of gulls—and beyond that, the gentle waves of the sea. 

With the hare and his heart cradled together, the boy bent to pick a yellow flower from its home. It looked like a small sun. He tucked it behind his ear, to keep himself warm.

The old woman’s grip returned, leading him purposefully through the new forest, until they both came to a small dappled clearing. In the middle was an oak tree, larger than any the boy had ever seen. Its branches stretched up and up, until they arched, and reached out over the surrounding canopy. Birds settled in the branches. He thought he saw a flash of red and gold before it ribboned away.

He looked at the hare in his arms. He looked at Babulya. He blinked, and she was holding an iron chest.

The heavy lid creaked up, held open by her claws.

"Inside," she said.

He kissed the hare’s soft head. It began to kick and struggle the moment he lowered it into the chest, trying to get back to him. He held it down with one hand as gently as he could while he fumbled for the lid. When it fell closed, the frantic thumping of the hare's limbs went silent.

“Bury it,” said the old woman.

The boy put his heart at the roots of the great tree and dug into the soft earth with his bare hands. 

When the sun was setting beyond the uneven horizon, and the boy's fingers were raw from digging, the old woman said, “That’s enough,” and he stopped, short of breath, shivering against the evening chill. The little yellow flower had fallen from behind his ear, lost to the pile of dirt next to the hare’s grave. With the last of his strength, he put the thread, inside the needle, inside the egg, inside the duck, inside the hare, inside the chest, inside the ground below the great oak tree, and covered it with all the soil his small pale hands had touched.

Babulya pulled him up.

With dirt-stained fingers, the boy took his heart from the roots of the tree, held it close, and looked up at her.

"Will my heart stay inside, now?"

“As long as that chest is safe,” she said, “you will never die.”

The boy swallowed. He was so tired.

“But," he said, his throat tight with betrayal, “Babulya, that’s not what I wanted—"

He blinked the sting from his eyes, and the cries of the gulls were gone. Snow bit at his ankles. They were back in the forest. 

The old woman laughed like nails against stone. “Now that does not matter,” she said. “Now, no matter what happens to your heart, inside or outside, you will live on. Is that not better?”

The boy began to weep. The tears froze on his cheeks, sticking like burrs on his wind-bitten skin, but the old woman swept them away with her bony thumbs, stooping to his height to cradle his face.

“You will see that it is, child. Very soon.” She kissed his forehead with cool, wrinkled lips, and sharp, pointed teeth.

He watched the bony-legged woman walk back into her chicken-legged house, and then they both ambled precariously back into the woods, until the squares of light from the house’s windows were only glowing, flickering puncture wounds in the distance, like eyes in a gently swaying body. He looked down at his heart. It was beating more strongly now, steady against his cupped hands; it looked pinker, healthier, like a newborn child swaddled in its birthing blanket. But now, it was just a muscle—nothing more. The empty hollow beneath the boy’s ribs _ached_.

This time, when he opened his coat and pressed it gently against the hole in his breast, it went in.

He knew it would not stay; there was nothing left to hold it there. But it would beat, until it stopped, but even then it would not matter.

**Author's Note:**

> Based on Koschei the Deathless' recipe for immortality.
> 
> **Babulya (бабуля)** — Granny (endearing, ingratiating)  
>  **Voyevoda (воевода)** — Old Slavic (Russian variant), warlord  
>  **Zima (зима)** — winter


End file.
